


The List

by Missy



Category: My Name is Earl
Genre: Canon Compliant, Food Poisoning, Gen, Humor, Lists, Missing Scene, Yuletide Madness 2015, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 04:08:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5524877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Karma has a weird way of helping Earl out.  Happy accidents or not, here's a short compilation of all of the times Earl's attempts at fixing people's lives through the List failed because Karma beat him to it - and the one time he managed to make everything even better when Karma fails its job.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The List

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deifire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deifire/gifts).



_#322: Made a guy in a banana suit lose his job_

Earl barely remembered this one. He was drunk, the guy was angry and he’d punched him. For some reason the fella in charge had taken Earl’s side and fired the poor man right on the spot. It took some doing but he’d managed to attach a name to a face and a face to a new job.

Turned out the banana suit guy had taken his failure and turned it into a success; he was a professor at a local community college teaching agriculture. Earl donated three bucks to his popcorn business Kickstarter and called it a night.

_#69: Made a drunk girl fall in love with a wooden woodpecker_

Another drunken escapade, this time at a flea market. Earl and Joy had been arguing over the worth of an old woodpecker carving that Joy’s uncle had made, and when the woman who bought it tried to haggle with them over the price Earl lied to her and said it was an ancient, very expensive antique from Sweden. She’d paid them a hundred dollars for the carving and he and Joy had shared a rare laugh over the memory.

Susan Pennyford remembered the incident all too well. Her anger over the incident was, in fact still sharp – so sharp that she’d taken her defeat and turned it into a thousand dollar antique appraisal business. She wasn’t happy to see him when he caught up with her – but she was willing to make a deal.

And so Earl bought a useless but very attractive tin bank of a dog peeing on a signpost and called them even.

_#679: Threw Santa into a fountain._

It was Black Friday, and Black Friday used to cause Earl to take a total leave of his sanity as he dashed around Camden trying to get presents for his kids without disappointing them or breaking the bank. This one time he was confronted by a bellringer, a guy in a Santa outfit with his little red kettle, while diving through the discount pile of action figures. "Santa" had made the grave mistake of getting between Earl and the last Rocket Man. The resulting fight ended with the guy swimming in the drink and Earl holding the figure aloft like a conquering warrior.

Clearly, the best way to make it up to this guy was to give him the best Christmas ever. Earl spared no expense when it came to giving him the best time he could conjure up. There was snow and cookies (store bought) and cocoa. There was even a flock of reindeer and a very large snowman.

But "Santa" was out of town, so Earl had to settle for hashing things out with him over a round of drinks when he came back, weeks after Christmas.

_#444: Accidentally gave a competitive eater food poisoning_

Earl wasn’t cut out to be a waiter, and he figured that out pretty quickly when he accidentally served some spoiled sour cream to a competitive eater and caused him to lose his lunch – and his crown – during the Camden County Fair’s apple pie eating contest. 

His name was Dan The Destroyer which was an easy enough name to research. Earl showed up at the guy’s house with a plane ticket and a map of all of the world’s finest eating contests on it, surely a tempting sight if there was one for a competitive eater trying to regain his lost glory. But it turned out that Dan had given up the sport when Earl had poisoned him. “And I’ve never felt stronger,” he added. Seems he was glad to be out of the competitive eating biz, glad to have a different set of skills working for him. He’d started making elaborate sculptures out of toothpicks, and they sold amazingly well on Etsy.

Earl fixed his mistake by helping the guy drive his latest toothpick sculpture to Chicago. One traffic accident later they’d ended up hungry, broke and starving in Chicago with no sculpture to brag of. That was when Earl noticed a sign on the wall of a nearby diner – “finish our 80 ounce porterhouse in fifty minutes and your whole meal is free.”

Less than an hour later, Dan had attracted a throng of onlookers. Earl watched, hopefully, as he bit through the meal, every last drop disappearing between his lips until finally, miraculously, the last bit disappeared between his lips just before the clock struck on the hour.

The cheering crowd and the satisfied grin on Dan’s face made it all worthwhile.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide!


End file.
